Most companies do not realize the importance of technical SEO in Dubai. You could have the most carefully constructed content with proper keyword research, but unless you pay attention to the technical aspects of SEO, you would never see improvements in your organic traffic.
While there are a lot of factors to consider to get it right, here are the 5 most common mistakes you will find with technical SEO in Dubai.
1: Not Using SSL
SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, is a technology used to secure network traffic between browsers and servers. A website using SSL is marked with the https in its URL, along with a badge saying ‘Secure’ on leading browsers.
But what does it have to do with SEO? Directly, nothing. SSL is about preventing MIM attacks or hacking attempts and improves network security. Google’s algorithm, however, takes it into account when ranking pages, so your website can suffer in search results if it isn’t https.
Thus even if SSL is not mandatory for any website, it is recommended to get an SSL certificate from any provider like Rapid SSL, Symantec or Comodo, and integrate it with your WordPress backend. You don’t want Google (and browsers) to disregard your site as insecure.
2: Not Setting up the Canonical Tag
It is very common for multiple URLs to link to the same page. Often, the page itself can generate multiple links through backlinking, syndication or user path.
Now, to a web crawler (which builds the directory for a search engine), all these different URLs register as duplicate content. This can lower your site rankings considerably.
A very simple fix is to add the rel = ‘canonical’ attribute to the header tag of your original HTML page. This tells the search engine to consider that page as the preferred version, categorizing all other links as copies of it.
3: Not Updating the XML Sitemap Regularly
An XML sitemap is essentially a list of all the links on your site that you want the search engine to index. This is an important step for improving technical SEO in Dubai.
A properly configured sitemap makes it easier for web crawlers to access your site, which in turn makes your content rank better. For that, you must update your XML sitemap every time you make any URL changes in your website, as discrepancies between the sitemap and the actual site can pull down your rankings.
4: Not Restricting Crawl Depth
Crawl depth is simply the number of clicks it takes to reach any page of your website. Not only does an unnaturally high crawl depth make it difficult for your users to find content, but it also for the search engine itself.
The best practice is to keep your crawl depth to no more than three clicks. You can achieve this quite easily by making good use of breadcrumb navigation and internal linking in your content. You will be surprised at how much this simple measure can boost your search engine rankings.
5: Not Applying the nofollow tag
A lesser-known aspect of technical SEO in Dubai is taking advantage of the nofollow tag, one of the simplest and most important things you can do with your linking. Basically, adding the nofollow tag to any outbound link on your site tells the search engine not to pass the credit for your content to the linked site.
This is especially important for unnaturally earned outbound links, such as paid content, and links that come from user-generated content like comments. Otherwise, the search engine simply assumes that the linked sites are the source for your content, and pass on the ranking benefits to those sites.